Down the Nile Read online

  It has never been the custom, however, for foreign visitors to operate their own craft on the Egyptian Nile, and in modern times the government actively discourages such journeys. Tourists opt instead for the cruise ship or, less often, hire an Egyptian sailor to captain a felucca, the traditional lateen-rigged sailboat ubiquitous in Egypt. In my first four weeks in Egypt, I had neither seen nor heard of any foreigners on the river unaccompanied by an Egyptian captain or of a single woman, Egyptian or otherwise, operating a boat on the river. Still, I saw no truly persuasive reason that the trip I had in mind should not be possible for me. Narragansett Bay was a body of water complicated by altering tides, sometimes large waves, sudden violent weather, scores of international shipping tankers powered by propellers the size of houses, and speedboats occasionally operated by reckless drunken drivers. In Egypt, though the Nile did indeed have its own peculiar set of hazards, there would be none of that. The Egyptian Nile was hardly a wilderness: more than fifty-five million people lived alongside it; there were no ferocious animals left there to speak of; and I knew that a desperate traveler armed with a little bit of money could find her way off the river, one way or another, at any time.

  The more I learned about the Nile, the less forbidding it seemed. I had so often imagined rowing on the Nile that doing so had begun to feel less like a fantasy and more like a memory that only wanted its corresponding action rightfully exercised.

  Two years after my first visit, I returned to Egypt, determined to find a boat and make my trip on the Nile. In an effort to acquaint myself with the stretch of the river that I was interested in rowing, I once again spent four days on the deck of a cruise ship, traveling — this time from Luxor to Aswan — with a pair of binoculars pressed to my face, examining every island and shoal, observing the currents, trying to gauge the swiftness of the river’s flow, watching fishermen at sunrise laying their nets. When rowing upriver, the fishermen hugged the shore, where the current was less intense and occasionally even eddied in reverse. Their boats sat low in the water, were flat bottomed, were made of steel, were on average twelve to fourteen feet long and three feet wide, and were roughly the shape of a Turkish slipper, narrowed at both ends but slightly higher and finer at the bow. As oars they used long, coarse, bladeless planks that resembled nothing so much as clapboards ripped from the face of a derelict house. They used not the U-shaped metal oarlocks I was accustomed to, but vertical pegs of wood or steel to which the immense oars were lashed with a length of prickly twine. The current never appeared swift enough to vex or deter these fishermen. They maneuvered their boats with breathtaking precision and finesse, making sudden one-hundred-eighty-degree turns with a simultaneous and contrariwise two-wristed snap. From Aswan to Cairo, the Nile bed falls little more than five inches per mile, which means the river offers a relatively slow, peaceful ride. In my observation, the current was swift but never roiling; there were no rapids to speak of other than those tossed up by the boulders of the first cataract above Aswan; and while there were shallows treacherous enough to stop a misguided cruise ship, none was shallow enough to prevent a small, light, flat-bottomed boat from smoothly proceeding. As for the dangerous ships Egyptians had warned of, there were no ships on the Nile that I could see, other than the plodding, festively lit cruise boats equipped with swimming pools and dance floors and packed with vacationing Europeans. (The size of these cruise ships was trifling compared to the hulking tankers I regularly marveled at on Narragansett Bay.) There was never a threat of rain. There was the possibility of a khamaseen, a hot southeasterly wind that whips dust out of the Sahara and renders the air a stinging, opaque mass,* but this was April and just in advance of the season for that. There was a large lock at Esna that looked complex and possibly like trouble for a small boat, and a few bridges that did not. As for crocodiles, there were, the captain of my cruise ship had dismissively confirmed with a dry laugh, no crocodiles whatsoever in the Nile below the High Dam.

  In planning my rowing trip, among my greatest worries was unwanted attention from the Egyptian police. In terms of freedom and accessibility, the Nile was a far cry from an American river on which any psychopath could, without hindrance or permission, indulge in any half-baked boating scheme he was capable of devising. I had been told that in order to travel alone on the Nile, I would need police permission, that such permission was not likely to be granted, and that if by some miracle permission was granted, weeks of bureaucratic wrangling would follow; I would have to come up with a considerable amount of money in fees; and that, in the end, if they let me go, the police would insist on sending an officer with me for my protection.

  Since the 1997 massacre of fifty-eight tourists at Luxor’s Temple of Hatshepsut (an act of terrorism euphemistically referred to in Egypt as “the accident”) and several other slightly less devastating terrorist attacks perpetrated by the extremist Islamic group Gama’at Islamiyah, the Egyptian government has at times elevated its tourist protection operations to levels worthy of visiting heads of state. A country of sixty-two million people whose chief source of income is tourism cannot afford another “accident.” Groups of foreign visitors who want to venture off the beaten tourist paths must now, in theory at least, be accompanied by a police convoy. Sightseers are often trailed by soldiers toting semiautomatic rifles, their sagging pockets stuffed with bullet cartridges bulky as bricks. More often than not, the soldiers are skinny, vaguely staring pubescents who carry their guns slung over their shoulders like cumbersome schoolbags, wear flip-flops for shoes, and spend a lot of time napping on the job. Security points have cropped up at important tourist sites — a show of outdated metal detectors and young guards rummaging halfheartedly through visitors’ handbags. At other times the security effort seems a mere rumor. “If you go to Fayoum, you’ll have to have soldier in your car with you once you get there.” I went to Fayoum. There was no soldier. At the Temple of Hatshepsut, where tourists had not long before been shot and hacked to death with machetes, I found the primary guard fast asleep in his guard-house, slumped heavily in his chair, mouth hanging open, arms dangling at his sides — so unconscious was he that even when I put my camera eight inches from his face and snapped his picture he never awoke.

  The Egyptian efforts at security are designed as much to make tourists feel safe as to actually frighten or deter militant Islamic terrorists intent on damaging the secular, West-tending Egyptian government. Fanatical terrorists could probably not be deterred, but vacationing tourists could be soothed and assured by the sight of Mubarak’s soldiers. As for the river police, I had seen a few police boats at Aswan and Luxor manned by large groups of young men, but nowhere else. If I asked the Egyptian police for permission to row a boat down the Nile, I would undoubtedly have to take them with me and perhaps endure at their hands the very intrusions and harassments they were supposedly there to protect me from. If I didn’t ask, I was on my own. The latter seemed preferable.

  As for random crime unrelated to terrorism, the rate of personal crimes against foreigners in Egypt was low because the consequences for perpetrators were dire. But for the violent period of Gamal Abdel Nasser’s nationalist revolution during the 1950s, when anti-European feeling was high, since the days of Napoleon’s invasion and the subsequent rule of Muhammad Ali, the average foreigner in Egypt has generally been accorded civil rights and a moral status superior to that of the native Egyptian. In the early nineteenth century, if a foreign visitor was murdered, every Egyptian within walking distance of the event would, without trial or investigation, be put to death as punishment. If a foreigner complained of having had his money stolen by one Egyptian, some thirty Egyptians would be jailed for a month. In 1849 Florence Nightingale observed, “The police which Mehemet Ali instituted . . . have effectually cleared the country and secured the safety of Europeans. No pains are taken to investigate who is the offender; when an offence occurs, the whole village suffers to save the trouble of inquiring who’s who . . . If you miss a pin now, the whole village is made
responsible for it, and the whole village bastinadoed.” And as late as 1872 Amelia Edwards, a British writer who traveled up the Nile, recorded an incident in which a member of her boat party, while hunting for fowl, accidentally grazed the shoulder of a child with his buckshot. Properly incensed, the local villagers grabbed the man’s gun from him, struck him on the back with a stone, and chased him back to his boat. Edwards’s party filed a complaint against the village. In response the governor of Aswan promised that “justice would be done,” arrested fifteen of the villagers, chained them together by their necks, and asked the hunter in what manner he would like the scoundrels punished. The hunter confessed that, not being familiar with Egyptian law, he had no idea what would be fit. The governor replied, “What-ever you want is Egyptian law.” The hunter stated that his aim was simply to “frighten [the villagers] into a due respect for travelers in general.” In turn, the governor assured the hunter that his only wish was to be agreeable to the English and averred that the entire village should have been beaten “had his Excellency [the reckless and obviously not too bright hunter] desired it.”

  The foreigner’s word was rarely questioned in Egypt, and the essence of that custom remains even now. One day while walking in Cairo with an American friend, two young boys called out to us, “Give us money!” When we didn’t reply, one of them threw a stone at us. In an offhand way my friend told an Egyptian man what had happened, and immediately the man summoned a police officer who swiftly collared the two boys and, to our dismay, beat them silly with a bamboo stick. Neither man had witnessed the event, neither had questioned whether our story of the thrown stone was true. The foreign tourist, protected by Egypt’s dependency on her cash, enjoys an unwarranted elevated status. In 1849 Flaubert wrote, “It is unbelievable how well we are treated here — it’s as though we were princes, and I’m not joking.” That particular social luxury had altered only slightly in a hundred and fifty years.

  The truth was that the biggest obstacle to my trip would not be political, natural, or criminal, but cultural. My attempt merely to purchase a boat would prove nearly more arduous than the trip itself. Had I a boat of my own with me, I would have simply put it in the water and slipped away, taking my chances as they came. But I had no boat, and I knew that finding one in Egypt would involve dealing with a succession of men who would wonder why a female foreigner wanted such a thing, would try very hard to dissuade me from my intentions, and would eventually suggest that instead of rowing down the river I should spend my time in Egypt dancing and dining with them.

  The Egyptian temperament — invariably gregarious, humorous, and welcoming — is also spiked with a heavy dose of intrusiveness. Curious and paternalistic toward foreigners, Egyptians watch over their visitors with elaborate concern — a sweetly self-important trait, as though one could not possibly survive without their attentions and advice. On seeing a pen tucked in my shirt pocket a gentleman says with genuine alarm, Madame! Be careful not to lose your pen! As I leave a hotel another says, Oh, lady! Please be sure to close your bag tightly for safety. Without asking if I want him to, a delightfully friendly shop-keep-er with mahogany-hued teeth and one pinkish, weeping eye, takes proprietary hold of my backpack, tamps at his tongue with a greasy crumpled cloth, and rubs dust from the pack with his plentiful saliva, saying, Better this way! When I put my hotel room key under the leg of my breakfast table to keep the rickety thing from wobbling, a waiter hurries over, plucks up the key, and says with regal self-congratulation, You dropped your key, madame. You must be careful! Once more, surreptitiously, I tuck the key beneath the table leg; dramatically he picks it up again. If I stand before a shop window full of wristwatches, within thirty seconds a passerby will put his nose to mine, point to what I am looking at, and inform me with the patronizing indulgence of a kindly professor instructing a barefoot hillbilly, “This is wristwatches, you see.” And it is nearly impossible for a foreigner to proceed down an Egyptian street without having to answer the same dozen investigative questions shot from the mouths of six dozen people within the span of, say, five minutes: What your name? Which your country? You are alone? Married? Children? Where you went today? My God, you shouldn’t go there. What you did last night? Oh, my God, I will tell you something better to do. What you want? No, no, you do not want that. You will want this better thing more. Do not walk that way. There might be a wolf/snake/bad man. Look out, my God, for the traffic.

  In Egyptians, this trait seems derived not only from a wish to try out the few English phrases they’ve learned but also from a particular conviction that they know far better than you do what’s good for you. Confronted with foreign tourists, Egyptians become noisy and nosy, bossy and brash, intrusive and terribly friendly.

  Not comprehending my wish to row myself down the river alone, well-meaning Egyptian men, I knew, would try to stop me or, alternatively, would offer a crippling degree of help. And so, as I began my search for an Egyptian rowboat, I resolved to take a slightly Fabian approach, to move slowly, evade questions, and tell no one exactly what it was that I wanted to do.

  Aswan

  MY SEARCH for a boat began in Aswan, the southernmost Egyptian city, the starting point of my rowing trip, and technically the beginning of the Egyptian Nile. I wanted a simple fisherman’s rowboat, long and narrow, with room enough to lie down in at night. I had estimated that my trip would take five days at most. Forewarned of the possibility of scorpions and adders along the riverbanks, I had no intention of sleeping on land. For four days, I roamed around Aswan and its islands looking for a suitable boat, searching the riverbanks, crashing through reeds, climbing over sand dunes and boulders, picking my way past bony dogs lying prone and comatose in the baked dust, scouring the mud-brick Nubian villages on Elephantine Island, asking oblique questions, fending off friendly advances, and trying, without luck, not to draw attention to myself.

  With unctuous persistence, felucca captains tried to hook my business as I walked by, dancing and clamoring around me like sheepdogs, following me sometimes for a quarter of a mile and so closely that their shoulders repeatedly brushed against mine. Remember me? they said into my ear, though they had never set eyes on me before. Where you are going? Want felucca? Sailing! Special price because you are special! Five bound. Maybe later? Maybe tomorrow? Cataract. West Bank. Why no? The phrases spilled out of them in perfectly inflected American English. At that time tourists were scarce in Egypt because of the rising fear of terrorism, and beneath the suave and chattering bravado the captains’ voices had the despairing ring of the mendicant’s plea. At any one time there might be thirty captains poised on a dock, waiting in vain for work. The very sight of them was coercive. Wondering how they survived, I felt a strong obligation to take their felucca rides. Whenever I declined and walked on, the captains reduced the already pathetically low five-pound fare to three, making me feel instantly stingy, though my declinations were never a matter of money.

  As I stumbled through Aswan, dozens of barefoot, cinnamon-skinned children trailed me. Dressed in little more than ragged dish towels, they were big-eyed, auburn-haired, seemingly weightless, and irresistibly beautiful in the rickety, knock-kneed way that newborn calves are beautiful. They had flies in their eyes, and noses running with snot. They had long curling eyelashes and narrow shoulders and tiny, dusty ankles. They wanted money, pens, and candy. “Hello, baksheesh!” they shrieked. “Hello, pen! Hello, bonbon!” They trailed after me sometimes for ten minutes, emitting jagged moans of entreaty, twisting their faces into little Greek masks of tragedy, dancing on the hot stones, and plucking at my hips until I gave them something. Eventually I bought a large box of pens and a bag of hard candy, collected a stack of fifty-piastre notes, stuffed this various arsenal of baksheesh into my pockets, and, like a pandering candidate passing out campaign fliers, distributed it regularly as I skulked through the town.

  With a landscape unlike any other on the Nile, Aswan struck me as Egypt’s prettiest spot. Scattered with tiny green islands, the ri
ver in Aswan has the feel of a storybook oasis. Its banks, more desert dunes and granite cliffs than farmland, suggest the harsh Saharan void that surrounds the town, underscoring Aswan’s appeal as a cozy refuge. Between the town, on the east bank of the river, and the High Dam just to the south of it, granite bedrock and massive boulders whip to life a river that everywhere else in Egypt moves slowly and uniformly, like an intransigent bank of fog. Six hundred miles south of Cairo, a mere hundred miles from the Tropic of Cancer, home to many dark-skinned Nubians, and marking the border between Egypt proper and its southern ethnic region of Nubia, the city of Aswan feels more African than any other Egyptian town. The place has a sharp-edged clarity, as if chiseled and burned clean by the sun; color glows here with greater intensity than anywhere else in the country. Because it is narrower and because there are many more feluccas here, the river at Aswan appears busier and more festive than it does at Cairo and Luxor. Large white triangles of sail crisscross the river in a kind of jaunty tarantella.